CONTINUED: Remembering Grandma by Harold Ratzburg

Being married to Grandpa was not easy.  He was very frugal when it came to spending money on things that his wife would like to have, like curtains for the house.  Who needs them, he must have figured.  He tended to drink a lot and sometimes when he came home from town with “his shoes full” as the old saying went, he became right down nasty and abused Grandma. Family legend has it that my Dad and his Brother Herman sometimes slept in the same room as Grandma to prevent Grandpa from beating up on her when he came home drunk. The legend also tells that when Grandma was pregnant, Grandpa helped himself to sexual favors from the hired girl.  He was far from being an angel, more like a certified S.O.B. if you ask me.  My Dad once mentioned to my Brother Lyle, that the reason he would never strike his wife or one of us kids, is that he saw how brutality hurt the whole family

                Grandpa was the boss and owner of the farm, and way back when, he was known to have one of the best horse farms in the area, with beautiful trotters for the buggies and work horses for the plow.  Unfortunately, good friends (?) found that if they would come and talk to Grandpa up behind the barn and be nice to him, he would sign personal notes for them, and in doing so, when they could not pay the notes, Grandpa couldn’t either, and so he signed the farm away into bankruptsy.

                Grandpa died in 1938 with the farm financially underwater.  Bankruptsy meant that Grandma couldn’t hold it together, so my Dad, Louie, took it over, and  Dads siblings signed off  on their shares.  In 1941, with the help of a lawyer, he worked out a written agreement, with his mother, (my Grandma of course), which contained some interesting clauses.  It provided, for example, that Grandma would live in the same house as our family and eat at the same table.  If she decided that she would rather live alone in a separate part of the house, (which she did), Dad would need to provide her with split wood to heat her rooms, plus 200 pounds of meat each year, Milk and cream as needed, 5 pounds of butter per month, 400 pounds of potatoes and 200 pounds of flour each year, and 2 dozen eggs each week.  She was also guaranteed the use of the well for water and use of the cellar to store her food.  That did cover it rather well, I do believe.

                My early memory kicks in about 1938 when Grandpa died.  I sort of remember his body lying in state in the living room for a day or so for viewing, but that’s about all I remember about him. 

Grandma was a saint and loved us kids dearly and showed it to us all the time, and so, following are some stories about Grandma and what I remember of her and her love for us young ones.

SOUP IN A BISS----Now that is a concoction you don’t see much anymore mainly because you don’t see many tin cans used regularly in the kitchen for cooking and eating.  A “biss” was a plain old tin can about 6 inches high and 4 ½ inches across that originally came filled with something to eat from the store.  It was cleaned out and became part of an old farm wife’s cookware in the kitchen.  The soup was made from bread, broken up into smaller pieces and put into the biss.  But----pay attention now----it had to be homemade bread, not the store bought, Wonder Bread kind.  On top of that bread, put enough sugar to sweeten to this kids taste and pour milk over it to make a brew, and that was a “soup in the biss”.  It was always the favorite of us kids, especially if you had a sweet tooth like I did, and still have.

What made it kind of memorable in our house was that frequently, Grandma would treat me with  soup in a biss, just before my meal times back in the other side of the house with my family, and it ruined my appetite----which really annoyed my mother enough times that it made a big enough “discussion” in the house that as a kid, I remember it.  You probably know how it can be, with two women living in one house together.

BLOODY BUTCHERING TIME----Blood of any kind really gets the attention of any kid, and I was certainly not an exception.  There were plenty of butchering times around the farm back then because it was a natural part of putting home grown food on the table.  Grandma, and all other farm wives thought nothing of going out to the chicken coop, and taking that long stiff piece of wire that we called the “chicken hook” and fishing around through all the chicken legs and feet under the flock of chickens,  until she would hook the leg of the hen that she wanted to cook for supper.  Then, it was off to the chopping block, and off with the head and so on till that poor old chicken was on the table.

Butchering pigs was a much bloodier affair, when a hog would caught, tipped over on its side and stuck in the throat with my Dad’s special “sticking knife” that he  used.  The pig needed to be held down on the ground to bleed out, so that Grandma, with her old pioneer training, could come forward with her dish pan to catch the blood that gushed out of the wound.  That blood shortly wound up on the table as Grandma’s blood sausage, using the intestines of that same pig as casing for the sausage.  As a kid I was able to help with the process of cleaning out the intestines by pouring water through them, and then cranking the handle of the food grinder to stuff the guts with the blood sausage material that Grandma had cooked up.

COOKING HOME MADE SOAP----This was all part of Grandma’s pioneer background and training.  Living in a log house when she was first married gave her all sorts of work that brides these days will certainly never experience,  (I will add right here, that at this point in the story, some of your readers might be saying-----“Hold on there a minute, we can still butcher and handle these jobs as well as any pioneer could”------but my statements go with thoughts about my kids and Grandkids and their experiences of growing up and living in today’s metropolitan world with a supermarket just down the street, and NOT on a farm.)

Anyway, when it came to making soap, it was a chance for me to “help out” Grandma by PLAYING WITH FIRE!!!!!!!!!!!  I never knew or cared much about how Grandma took some of the parts of that butchered pig that were not edible and turned them into soap, but I do recall that several cans of “Red Devil Lye” was part of the concoction.  The best part of it for us kids is that the concoction had to be boiled for a long time, and Grandma handled that by using a big, 30 inch diameter cast iron kettle which she hung over the fire out in the yard, on a framework made of cedar poles.  Under the pot was the fire which had to be fed with fresh wood for a long time, and that is where we kids had our fun.  Just imagine, being allowed to feed a fire and keep poking around in it to keep it burning good and even being appreciated for our efforts.  (To us it was just fun) 

It beat the heck out getting caught, like happened to me one time, when I was playing with matches and dry corn husks in the sawdust filled ice house.  Dad was not happy when he caught me, but at least I knew enough to NOT try that in the hay mow of the barn.

After cooking long enough, Grandma would let the pot hang to cool off, and the finished product was a layer of soap, about two inches thick, which was cut into blocks and used for washing clothes.  In earlier pioneer days, I’m sure it was used for all purposes, including shampooing the hair and other personal hygiene.

GRANDMA’S HEALTH CONCERNS----Grandma was always concerned about the health of her grandkids, and one of her major concerns about me, that drove me wild, was that I was going to ruin my eyesight by reading too much.  When our family received a pile of old magazines that had been salvaged from a dump near Milwaukee by a relative and brought up north to us poor relatives on the farm, I was in seventh heaven, cause now I had something new to read.  I had my favorite reading hideouts, like up in my “fort” above the corn crib, or in the soft hay of the hay mow.  I couldn’t read too much in the house because Grandma would keep nagging me about it.  When I had to change reading locations, I would roll the magazine around my lower leg and hold it in place inside my sock while I casually walked across the yard.  I out-foxed Grandma like that every time.

Reading in bed, with a flashlight was a real no-no!!!  With flashlight batteries costing at least five cents apiece, back in those days, such extravagance was just out of the question.  Reading in bed with the electric power that was installed in the house in 1936 was difficult too, because the sole light in my bedroom was a bare single bulb hanging down from the ceiling in the middle of the room, switched on and off with a string stretching  from the bulb socket to the bed post.  The electric building code back then did not provide for receptacles along the walls, but then, we couldn’t afford extra bed lamps either.

GRANDMA’S PETS----Understandingly, cats and dogs were and are a normal part of a farmer’s life, but Grandma, accumulated a few unusual ones.

The first one, long before my time, was a pet deer.  I know about it only through family legends, but it seems that somewhere, somehow, the family found a small male fawn up north somewhere, that was adopted into the family as a pet.  It was not exactly legal to have a wild life pet, even back in those days, and as the story goes, the game warden got wind of it and came to check it out.  Again, as the story goes, that deer was so wise that when the game warden showed up on the yard, the deer went and hid itself behind a pile of lumber stacked in a corner of the barn and granary, and the warden never was able to pin down this illegal possession incident.  The deer was raised to adulthood on the farm, but as it got older, it got a more and more nasty disposition and had to be kept behind a fence.  Eventually, it got so nasty that it tried to tear up the fence by twisting it with its antlers and it had to go.  It probably ended up on the farm kitchen table as a venison meal, because the head and antlers were mounted and adorned the living room wall for years.  That mounted head even followed the family when the farm was sold and Ma and Dad moved to downtown Marion, where it hung in the garage for a number of years after that.

The pet pig that Grandma raised was a different story.  Grandma was always a soft touch for the weak and helpless, so in this case, when a sow got a large litter of piglets, there was one small, runty, piglet that was always last at the sow’s supper table and physically crowded to the rear end of its mothers rows of teats, which were most of the time out of reach for the little guy.  Grandma saw this and took pity on the piglet and took it up to the house to feed it out of a baby bottle and nipple.  It stayed up at the house, and eventually wound up penned up in a fence in Grandma’s garden.  The pig was never named, but it did become a family pet to all.

One of the surprising things we learned about pigs from this pet, was how clean pigs are when given a chance.  One of the most smelly jobs on a farm is cleaning out a pig stall, especially if it in an enclosed shed in the warm summer weather and it hasn’t been cleaned in a while. Pigs in the stall were forced to live there of course, but the pet pig had its own fenced pen, and it chose not to live like a pig.  It did its daily duty in a special place in one corner of the pen and all in all, it was a nice clean animal to be around.

Eventually however, Grandma’s pet pig went the way of most farm animals and became a farm product, when it was butchered and eaten by the family.  Very few farm animals, with the exception of dogs and cats, ever die a natural death.

GRANDMA’S PASSING----In 1948, after I had finished High School and then worked for the summer in Milwaukee to save up some money, Dick Kreuger, Gene Major, and I took off in Dick’s 1934 Chevy to go down to Florida and work there for the winter as an adventure trip to escape Wisconsin’s cold.  We searched for jobs in Jacksonville FL and couldn’t find any so we drove across the state (living on catsup sandwiches and sodas as I recall) to Tampa where we didn’t find any work either.  We finally got the idea that maybe Wisconsin was not so bad after all, and headed back to good old Marion.  We arrived home just in time for me to be a pall bearer for Grandma at her funeral from St. John’s Lutheran Church.

Goodbye Grandma, you were a wonderful Grandmother.

copyright 2014 by Harold Ratzburg

CONTINUED: The Madcap Adventures of Eliezer Gurevitch

Turkey was not much better.  This time they may have been persecuted by a different aggressor but the reason remained the same.  They were Jews. I learned through my sister-in-law, Sylvia, that she remembers her dad talking about the day of his Bar Mitzvah which  occurred shortly after the family moved to Turkey.  He recalled that following his Bar Mitzvah he was carried on the shoulders of the men through the streets, a long standing tradition.

Eventually the family migrated to Palestine by ship carrying British passports.  I don't know the circumstance of how the passports were obtained, probably illegally. Jews were not welcome there as well.  Their new enemies were the Arabs.   The British government, no friend of the Jews,  did not want the hassle of dealing with the politics of the region. They provided weak protection to the settlers. 

As more Jews from Europe fled to Palestine, anger against them grew and they formed groups to protect themselves.  One well known group was the Haganah.  It was a Jewish paramilitary organization, in what was the British Mandate of Palestine from 1920 to 1948.  Believing that they could not rely on the British for protection from local Arab gangs, the Jewish leadership created the Haganah to protect Jewish farms and kibbutzim during the 1920's.  Following the 1929 Palestine riots, the Haganah's role changed dramatically.  It became a larger organization acquiring foreign arms and going from an untrained militia to a capable underground army.

The yellowed document I wrote about earlier revealed the applicant as Eliezer Gurevitch formerly Asher Segal which may have been an alias that he had once used.  My sister-in-law filled in the missing pieces of the puzzle, a story my husband knew little of.  I had an opportunity to share as well because I had always heard that my father-in-law was from the Republic of Georgia. 

I learned that my father-in-law worked for the Haganah.  He secreted guns in the luggage compartment of Palestinian tour buses while doubling as a driver for a Palestinian touring company.  He and his cousin did this risky work until it became too dangerous.   His mother borrowed money to pay for a visa and and roundtrip passage to the United States.   He sailed to New York harbor arranging to meet with his American family who had emigrated to Buffalo, New York.  During his brief stay in Buffalo, family in Cleveland, Ohio introduced him to four unmarried sisters.  He had a choice of marrying any one of them!  Their father judiciously allowed his daughters the right to refuse a proposal if any one of them had strong feelings against the suitor.  He reminds me of Tevye from " Fiddler on the Roof who allowed two of his daughters to marry for love.  Unheard of during the early years of the twentieth century.  He chose my mother-in-law, Edna, because she laughed at his jokes and had a good sense of humor.  She expressed her desire to marry the handsome young man.  After a two week courtship, they married. He was twenty-four and she thirty-five.  She was advised by her sisters not to talk about her age.  She never told him that she was eleven year's older but he knew how old her siblings were and that she was the oldest of six.  Years before he died, my father-in-law took my husband and me into his confidence and said, "Mama doesn't know that I know how old she is.  That is to remain our secret."  Only after his death did she learn. She did not apply for Social Security when it was possible for her to do so because she didn't want her husband to know that their marriage had begun with a lie. She ruefully told the family, " He should have told me that he knew.  I could have collected Social Security ten years earlier!"

Three weeks after marrying Elias, his visa expired and he reluctantly returned to Palestine.  During the spring of 1931, he learned that he was going to become a father.  Baby Sylvia was born on January 21, 1932.  Her dad was able to return to the states a week before her birth. much to everyone's relief.

To the average onlooker my father-in-law's life must have seemed monotonous.  He  worked seven days a week during the early years of their marriage operating a gas station  and had little time and money for fun and leisure. On national holidays he managed to pile Sylvia and six small children from the neighborhood into his coupe and head for Euclid Beach Park on Lake Erie.  He bought tickets for all the children to go on the rides and treated them to ice cream.  He treasured those moments as  did his daughter, Sylvia.

Life was hard for the Gurev family and millions of other young couples starting out as the Great Depression deepened until the advent of World War Two.   The newlyweds moved into Edna's parents' home.  Seven adults shared a three bedroom house.  The sisters-in-law slept on an enclosed back porch which was freezing in the winter. When Sylvia no longer slept in a crib, she slept in the dining room on a cot.  She got no rest until the adults went to bed.  She never called her dad "daddy" until she was twelve probably because she rarely saw him as he went to work before she awakened and worked until 10:30 at night.

Sylvia remembers her father as honest, brave, polite and proud.  He was fluent in six languages, had an excellent education since his father worked for the czar for the first twelve years of his life but circumstances including the effect of measles prevented him from getting a  a job that required his intellect.  He loved being around children and telling whoppers.  His imagination allowed him to roam far and wide risking life and limb in death defying escapes.  In his late sixties, he and my mother-in-law took a long dreamed for trip to Israel meeting relatives in Tel Aviv and touring the country.  They somehow managed to walk up the crude steps at Masada to pay homage to those martyrs who died there long ago.

My father-in-law shortened his name some years later to Elias Gurev, a name I personally prefer because spelling my last name to those who don't know me would no doubt be more problematic than it already is.

Elias was not one to be bitter over all the family had lost during his younger years.  His joy came from his family and customers he befriended at his local gas station.  He told his daughter, Sylvia, that he had felt some momentary disappointment when the doctor told him he had a daughter but he could swap her for a boy if he remained unhappy.  They both had a good laugh knowing that once Sylvia nestled is her daddy's arms, he would never let her go.

They went from one child to having Harold six year's later and my husband, Jerry, four years after Harold's birth.  Jerry's birth was remarkable in that his mother was forty five when he belted out his first lusty cry.

Elias's tales will linger for as long as his children and grandchildren keep them alive.  

 Copyright 2014 by Sandra Gurev